My main excursion yesterday was to the western side of the island for several hours of hiking. One of the interesting geological features of Grand Manan is that the eastern side gently slopes into the ocean and has sandy beaches and lots of sheltered coves. So that’s where pretty much everybody lives. The western side, on the other hand, is much more dramatic with rock cliffs plunging a couple of hundred feet down into the water. Pretty much nobody lives on that side (I imagine the prevailing westerly winds blowing off of the cold water helped keep people away). But shipwrecks happened on that side as well and so there are lots of trails to and along the western side. So that’s where I went for some hiking yesterday.
But before I get to the pictures of the scenery, I have to live up to the title of this post. Before heading over to the other side of the island, I checked out a marshy area just down the road from the hotel and found my life bird of the day: Nelson’s Sparrow. No, they’re not named after my brother. That might be just as well: I thought they were kind of cute in their demure, sparrow sort of way, but their singing is about the most wheezy and feeble that I’ve ever heard out of a bird. Click on the link to hear what I mean.
At the beginning of my hike on the western side of the island I came across a Black-throated Blue Warbler and a Magnolia Warbler sharing a tree. I’ve seen both before, but they’re not exactly common and they’re two of my favourite species so it was a treat to get good views of both in the same tree. Warblers are considerably less demure than sparrows.
By far the cutest thing I saw was a family of Winter Wrens. I was hearing all these high-pitched call notes that I didn’t recognize and whose source I couldn’t find. So I decided to sit down and wait. Sooner or later something was going to show itself. And they did. All of a sudden I started seeing fledgling Winter Wrens all around me. I think there were around half a dozen of them plus their parents. Remember the Winter Wrens from my previous post? Well, now imagine them with stubby little tails sticking up and oversize beaks for having food shovelled into. They were definitely right up there with bunnies and that sort of thing.
They were flying around in various random directions so Mother Wren had quite the job of trying to shepherd them. Father Wren seemed less concerned—he spent the whole time sitting on a perch and singing away.
Okay, on to the pictures (some of these pictures definitely work better when seen larger, so click on them and then hit F11).
The fog at the top of the cliff was a bit spooky. It was breezy so it was moving rapidly up and over the cliff. The only thing was that there was never any fog at the bottom of the cliff or inland from the cliff. I guess there must have been some sort of temperature differentiation such that the water in the air started condensing just as the wind reached the top edge of the cliff and then stopped once it got over the edge.
Here’s Maine:
There was more dwarf cornel or bunchberry than I’ve ever seen before. The forest floor was carpeted with acres of it.
Dwarf cornel, incidentally, provides some of the fastest action in the plant world. Those white things aren’t petals—they’re bracts surrounding a cluster of little, nondescript flowers. Or visually nondescript. The real petals have filaments underneath them that are cocked, waiting for an insect to land on the flower. When one does, the flower effectively explodes, launching pollen out of little containers attached to the filaments. The pollen accelerates 800 times as fast as a space shuttle at liftoff.
A Hermit Thrush had built a nest a couple of feet from the path. It had babies in it:
Remember the second picture above? Here’s the same view on the way back:
The hike was about as good as they get. It was a warm, sunny day, but with a wonderfully refreshing breeze coming up from the ocean below. The air was redolent with sun-warmed fir and spruce resin. Winter Wrens and Hermit Thrushes were singing … remind me again why I should ever set foot on a university campus again.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer